Clarifications
What do you do if someone says one thing you don’t understand?
When you don't understand
Here are some common ways to ask for clarification. Do you remember them? (Click on the audio button ?? to listen.)
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These clarifications ask the speaker to repeat everything they said. They won’t know which part you don’t understand.
The same thing happens if you just say, “What?” The speaker may think you didn’t hear them or may not know which part you didn’t understand.
Of course, you could ask a long Wh- question, but it kind of interrupts the flow of the conversation, right?
And there’s all the tricky grammar to get right: Wh- + auxiliary verb + subject + main verb +...
All of these ways ?? to interrupt and to ask for clarification can slow down a conversation. To keep a conversation going, it's better to use focused questions.
Focused Questions
If there’s one part of a long explanation that you don’t understand, you should use a focused question. Focused questions help the speaker to understand exactly which part you didn’t catch.
There are two ways to ask a focused question:
1. Echo the part you didn’t understand with a question sound (rising intonation ?), like this:
2. Echo the sentence with a question word in place of the part you didn’t understand.
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The first way–echo with a question sound (rising intonation ?)–we will practice again.
Next, we’ll practice the second way to ask focus questions: echo with a question word.